Small Business IT Sophistication Defined

The development of small business research has been a very slow process, but following the lead of such researchers as DeLone, Cragg, King and Mahmood the understanding of small business is being expanded. Each of these researchers have offered models that suggest that organizational success is based in part on information technology (IT) and its impact on financial measures. Many reseachers including those cited above have also expressed the need to develop an understanding of the non-financial components of organizational success. In a current research project the questions of IT and its relationship to non-financial success are being studied, specifically if there is a direct and postitive relationship between IT and non-financial success. In a previous paper by Brownmiller and King, it was argued that if the motivator for the small business was not financial then the measures of success should also be non-financial. Early findings reported by Brownmiller and King were that financial issues were not the most important motivator of the small business owner. In developing this research a number of organizational success measures were examined and the basic finding was that there existed a lack of common definition of terms among researchers. In order to develop the foundation for this research, the development of a research model that focused on definition was undertaken. This model consisted of five major components, motivators, measures of success, organizational success, user sophistication and information technology. The relationship of the components outline the foundation of theresearch. The full definition of the model will be presented in future papers